Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal for Wikimedia Weather

Wikimedia Norway have had a meeting with Meteorologisk Institutt (http://met.no) in Norway about using the dataset published by the institute. Today the dataset is used for the service Yr.no (http://yr.no), a joint venture between them and Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (http://nrk.no). Met said it would be pleased if the data could be utilized somehow, later this was confirmed by NRK. The dataset is localized to within 4km in Norway and updated in about 4 hour cycles. There are available lookup for 7.5 million places around the world, and 700 000 places in Norway. Base data are the HIRLAM model (High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the EC model from The European Weathercenter ECWMF. HIRLAM has 10 km resolution of the grid. When requesting data for named places the data from the grid is interpolated to build the new weather forecast. The dataset is made available with an open license, they request attribution and "truthful reproduction", basically you can't say it is from Met and falsify the dataset. You can't add a few degrees to make the weather look better at a certain place and still claim its sourced from Met. This is analogous to editing a news photo at Commons so its not a truthful reproduction of the event anymore. There are one disclaimer for sites with pornographic or racist content which may be troublesome for a CC-by-sa -licensed site. They do although allow use on commercial sites. Other than that the licensing should be given due consideration. My personal opinion is that they should be kindly asked to make the dataset available according to CC-by-sa to make reuse easier. Our proposal to Met/NRK was to make an extension that could be localized for various languages, based on the XML-data streamed from their site, and to use something like this for Wikinews. Unfortunately we have not been able to get sufficient funding for the project. We also need some backing from the community if this should be considered a viable project. Short information in english about Yr.no http://www.yr.no/english/1.2025949 Page about licensing (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/verdata/1.3321307 Page about services available (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/verdata/ Some locations http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/ http://www.yr.no/place/Bouvet_Island/ http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/B%C3%A5tsfjord/Makkaur/ http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/New_York/New_York~5128581/ http://www.yr.no/place/China/Xinjiang/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi/ Page about how the weather forecast is made (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/informasjon/1.3687572 John Erling Blad Wikimedia Norway Tris Thomas wrote: